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Frénk van der Linden - AMONG DUTCH HEROES

How does a written portrait by a journalist compare to a portrait made by an artist? Is the 'hand of the creator' also evident in a journalistic portrait? How can we identify this? Is the portrait about truth or about beauty? Do these two approaches share any common ground? In the Among Dutch Heroes exhibition, 25 written portraits by Frénk van der Linden (1957) enter into a dialogue with their visual art equivalents (paintings, drawings, photographs). The exhibition can be seen from 14 October 2017 in Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle. The exhibition opens on Van der Linden's 60th birthday.

Van der Linden strives to instil a new dimension to the existing image of his wide range of interlocutors, whether they be Freddy Heineken or Anouk. At the same time, he is well attuned to the notion that any interview is merely a snapshot in time and ultimately coloured by the creator's mood and approach. The exhibition in De Fundatie, therefore, is an ode to portraiture, yet also puts it firmly into perspective.

Frénk van der Linden's career was launched in 1981 with a much talked about interview with Joseph Luns, who was NATO's Secretary General at the time. Thousands of interviews followed. He was quickly recognised as one of the most valued and respected interviewers in the Netherlands. With his highly attuned psychological antennae, meticulous and incisive research and technical finesse, he knows exactly how to extract things from his interviewees. Although some describe this as just a little too much information at times. In 1999 the Volkskrant newspaper noted: ‘Van der Linden has matched legendary interviewers such as Bibeb and Ischa Meijer’.

After forty years of interviews for newspapers, weekly magazines, radio and TV programmes, his output can certainly be described as staggering. Museum De Fundatie decided that Van der Linden's 60th birthday would be the perfect moment to present 25 of his portraits in the museum. The exhibition mirrors an accurate image of the past four decades. At the same time, in a light-hearted manner, it ponders the shared space between journalistic portraits and the visual arts. True to Van der Linden's approach, the Among Dutch Heroes exhibition may reveal a shade more of the journalist's mind than he may think. Like it or not, Frénk is left just as exposed in this exhibition as his interviewees once were.